Prevention is better - and cheaper - than cure

Natural disasters used to be called acts of God because human beings admitted no responsibility for such events, and made only limited efforts to alleviate their consequences. But there has been a slow revolution in the understanding of how men and women are complicit with nature in ways that can magnify or minimise climatic and geological catastrophes. What the study of disasters reveals is that habits of solidarity are more important than wealth and technical resources.

The reporting of the Mozambique floods, with its concentration on the visual drama of the helicopter rescue operation, gives the impression that those affected are passive victims. But it is difficult to believe that this society, which endured years of war and which experienced those same years as a time of local self-government under extreme stress, has not been helping itself. True, the challenges with which people in Mozambique were used to coping - survival in the wake of military operations, war casualties, and damage to crops - have been cruelly replaced by a different kind of emergency. This is particularly harsh because, before the waters rose, the country may well have been on the brink of a period of economic growth that some thought would make it an unusual African success story. The floods will set that prospect back. But, again, where people have habits of self reliance and where local leaders accept their responsibilities, recovery can be swift.

It is right to be critical of those countries who could have helped, but have not so far done so, or those who could have helped more quickly. Britain, in particular, should have responded earlier to an emergency in a country which joined the Commonwealth precisely because it wanted to be part of a larger, English-speaking community; one which, among other things, could help it out in times of trouble. There seems, for instance, no reason why the British commando carrier could not have been diverted to Mozambique a week ago. Had that been done, its helicopters and marines would have been in action now.

Yet Britain has still reacted more effectively than other countries, apart from South Africa. The United States is only just beginning to notice the situation, and France, Germany and even Portugal, for all the old connections, are also laggard. Other African countries have done little.

What Kenneth Westgate, director of Cranfield University's centre for the study of disaster management, calls the "US cavalry" model of disaster relief has led some to call for a permanent international rescue force. The Israeli radical, Uri Avnery, writing after last year's Turkish earthquake, called for "a world organisation . . . with a regular international command structure and an international general staff, similar to a military outfit. The commander should have authority to declare a world emergency within minutes after a disaster," and to mobilise "national units of trained and equipped rescue experts."

Those who oppose such ideas say not only that the practical obstacles are huge, but that even if they were overcome the resulting organisation would be costly and unwieldy. Better, they suggest, to stay with the existing informal system, in which there is already international coordination of specialised national teams. It does not work too badly unless nature outwits it, as was the case in Mozambique when a second bout of rainfall compounded the effects of the first.

But, although there should have been a swifter international response, that is not the main lesson to be drawn from this and other disasters. Kenneth Westgate points to the immense disparity between the international money spent on rescue and rehabilitation and that available for preventive measures. Some of these are matters of relatively simple and cheap equipment, where foreign money can be easily applied.

Other goals are both more elusive and more important. They concern a society's collective perception of risk, its treatment of its poorest classes, and its standards of behaviour. A society which scores high in these categories, even if it is not a wealthy society, prepares more intelligently for disasters, gets through them with fewer lives lost, uses international aid more efficiently, and recovers more quickly. At its broadest, disaster management shades into the general offensive on poverty and ignorance and into efforts to make societies more participatory, democratic, and comradely. The World Bank's new disaster management facility, for instance, operates on the basis that reducing poverty is the key to diminishing the impact of disasters.

The scale of the problem when conceived of in this holistic way is daunting to many governments in wealthy countries. That is no doubt why they seem to prefer paying for rescue efforts to paying for prevention. The former involves a limited and episodic responsibility, the latter a more universal duty. There is obviously a connection between the recognition by wealthy nations that they have this duty and the recognition by nations particularly vulnerable to disasters that they also have duties.

One modest idea to link the two in concrete ways is represented by a newly formed group called the ProVention Consortium, which includes two leading insurance companies. The plan is to tie aid and insurance to measures to prevent and mitigate disasters, in this way reinforcing good habits.

The problem is not at all confined to the poorer countries. Studies show that long-term planning for disaster in developed countries is also defective, partly because of the reduction of risk in the past. Flood control measures, for example, can prevent lesser flooding but make the impact of a really serious flood worse. Reducing risk is thus a complicated business, but the most critical aspect is that people should have a day to day awareness of the relationship between their behaviour and future disasters. As long as this information is compartmentalised, disaster prevention will suffer in wealthy and poor countries alike.

The idea that war is the most serious problem requiring international attention is perhaps natural in a Europe which has been dominated by the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the past decade. But natural disasters kill more people than wars in most years. They killed 60,000 in 1999. It is true that wars can make natural disasters worse, and natural disasters can lead to wars.

At bottom, human security is indivisible. Yet a fraction of the funds western countries have been forced to expend in the Balkans might have made a large difference to such figures, particularly if it had been spent before rather than after disasters. Mozambique should make us think hard about such arguments.